EFF and COVID-19: Protecting Openness, Security, and Civil Liberties

EFF and COVID-19: Protecting Openness, Security, and Civil Liberties

EFF and its members work to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has made obvious how important the Internet and digital tools are to our lives and how vital it is that we maintain an open and secure approach to them.

Thanks to open access science, scientific and medical teams are able to instantly share their work and build on efforts to track the virus, study its effect on people, and develop vaccines. Others are developing ways to create and repair vital medical equipment using open tools, including reportedly 3D printing. We are coming together online and offline in new and creative ways, and ensuring that security, privacy, and openness are baked into the tools and services we use will only support our efforts.

In some ways, the explosion of open creativity online to keep us connected and sane during these scary times is one of the bright spots in the darkness. But in the United States, it also shows how this crisis disproportionately impacts those of us who are marginalized in society already—the unsheltered, those who cannot afford or access reliable broadband service to continue school or work, the consultants and retail workers who have little reserves, and all of those falling through our frayed social safety net. Innovation is needed here too—like ensuring that robust broadband access works for everyone, not just the wealthy, and is not dependent on temporary largess of some giant providers.

We Must Be Extra Vigilant In Defending Our Rights In This Moment

We also know that times of great public fear come with great risk. Public fear has driven some of the worst human rights atrocities, and given opportunities for those who would seize power from us and reduce or even erase our hard-won human rights and civil liberties. Already we see efforts to use this public health crisis as an excuse to place irrational blame on our Asian communities and direct even more pressure and discrimination against refugees and immigrants. We already see calls from companies seeking to cash in on this crisis for unchecked face surveillance, social media monitoring, and other efforts far beyond what medicine or epidemiology require.

We know that this virus requires us to take steps that would be unthinkable in normal times. Staying inside, limiting public gatherings, and cooperating with medically needed attempts to track the virus are, when approached properly, reasonable and responsible things to do. But we must be as vigilant as we are thoughtful. We must be sure that measures taken in the name of responding to COVID-19 are, in the language of international human rights law, “necessary and proportionate” to the needs of society in fighting the virus. Above all, we must make sure that these measures end and that the data collected for these purposes is not re-purposed for either governmental or commercial ends.

We Can Take Advantage Of Technology, and Emerge Stronger

As we head further into these difficult times, EFF is standing strong to make sure that we both take advantage of how technology can help us now and, equally importantly, that we emerge from this time with our freedom and democracy as strong, if not stronger, than when we went in. Because we at EFF have a committed membership as our primary support – over half of our annual budget comes from individuals — we are able to pivot our attention to these issues even as we continue our ongoing fights. Our lawyers are scrutinizing the proposed laws and regulations and corporate privacy moves, especially the growing and concerning raft of corporate/government surveillance efforts. Our technologists are digging into the digital tools we all rely on during this crisis to make sure that your privacy is protected. We’re pushing to lower artificial barriers to information sharing, and working to make sure that access to knowledge is one of the things we keep as we emerge from these times. And more.

Right now, when real science is so often under attack, those of us who care about truth, health, and each other need to take seriously the things that science and medicine are telling us about how to keep this virus from spreading. And we also need to be vigilant so that we come out the other side of this crisis with a society we want to live in and hand down to our kids. We can—and must—do both.

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